Journey To Nowhere

“What people forget is that the journey to nowhere starts with a single step.”- Survivor

Survivor by Chuck Palahniuk

               

        Tender Branson is a quirky individual with a cynical perspective on the world. Long ago as a child he was educated in the Creedish Church (a cult with its own commune) and warned of the terrors humanity would hold for him. Yet he, unlike his brother Adam Branson, was not the first born, and consequently was destined to pursue righteous work in the outside world. Contrary to the cheery expectations of finding a noble and fulfilling role in the outside world, this righteous work actually consists of terribly repetitive work serving humans in households tasks day by day. Tender was released from the cult, dished out into a world as a servant of humanity. The ideal job his cult had romanticized, quite frankly, sucks. His daily planner is full of an endless list of petty chores, and monotony consumes his every day. He soon even reaches a point where he obsesses over his daily planner and relies on it for stability like a Bible. It becomes his sole point of self-worth. Yet he truly deplores it, every last bit of it. He hates humanity and his own life. And, in his own cynical nature, criticizes humanity and fantasizes about a more enjoyable life after death. The days of his youth in which he stressed over exams where even more blissful: for then he had a purpose. He was working toward something greater even if it was a delusion at the time.

As the lives of remaining cult members begin dwindling away, Tender finds himself as the alleged sole survivor of the Creedish. (I say alleged because his brother Adam still lingers on in the shadows, but far from public knowledge.) As a direct result of this new status, he is put in the limelight and his mundane life as a caretaker for the wealthy disappears. Upon receiving celebrity status as the last surviving member of his cult, one would believe Tender’s life would take a turn for the better. It does not. Rather, as a subject of mass attention, his agent organizes teams which attempt to manufacture and refine every quality about him. His appearance becomes manipulated with the likes of skin care products and steroids. His health is overrun by a myriad of new miracle pills and an excessive workout routine. The autobiography of his life story is embellished and tweaked to make it the most marketable. For every confrontation with the media, his words are ascribed in writing. Everything is fake. Phony. Put on. He’s painted to fit an ideal, to be an attractive figure who fits the expectations of society and consequently earns wealth. As a celebrity, he has become even more of a slave to humanity. His overall worth is measured in mass appeal. While exercising on the Stairmaster, he thinks to himself “You’re going up and up and up and not getting anywhere. It’s the illusion of progress.” This statement illustrates the terribly fatalistic perspective on life that Tender feels. Life is getting him nowhere. He is just trudging on toward his inevitable death only escalated by the unhealthy and unwanted attention he is receiving.

        As a recent high school graduate, I sympathize with the Tender’s experience upon leaving his days of schooling in his cult. Unlike myself his education was much more one dimensional focusing solely on Home Economics. Yet I, like Tender, found that in my education my brain also lay dormant and restricted from seeing the near future that lie ahead. Palahniuk writes from Tender’s perspective, “We were so excited about passing tests, we never looked beyond the night of baptism”. This line resonates heavily with me. School, I believe, and education in general, can be just as much a vice as a virtue. As much as adults may worship the value of education, ultimately, its practical worth has limitations. School taught me to be a robot: to arrive in the morning, to sit in an assigned spot, to complete assigned exams. To leave in the evening. Rinse and repeat day in and day out.

While I value the information I have learned and believe my education has equipped me with tools that can allow me to better comprehend the world and others on a theoretical basis, I feel there lacks a distinct practicality in my educational experience. My parents say, do well. Get that “A”. My teachers echoed this sentiment. It was all too mechanical. Somewhere along the line they equated academic achievement with my greater success in the larger world, something I think is all too dangerous to do. For my success in itself is such a very personalized thing, and, in my blind education, I thought little of the future skyrocketing toward me, and only of my present: of the home work, projects, and exams before me. College applications emerged from almost nowhere. And I knew little of where they would lead me. The thinking and active preparation necessary to set goals for my own future were absent. I was taught to follow the leader, my teachers and parents. But I lacked the self-reflection necessary for acquiring happiness and purposeful direction. And without purposeful direction, I was just taking steps in the journey to nowhere.

Palahniuk’s thought provoking humor truly taps into the futility life can produce in individuals if you don’t break away from the greater oppressing system. The world wants to mold you, make you into the ideal piece of the greater machine of society. Educate yourself, they tell you. Then, you will find happiness and financial stability. Do your work, they tell you. That’s how good citizens conduct themselves. Do this. Do that. They push and pull, and you lose sight of yourself. How you feel.What you desire. What makes you happy. Life is all prescribed to you, unless you seize it by its neck and demand of it what you want, asserting your own personal values, even if they clash with those of society.

Tender’s life is a tragedy, he is oppressed, a lonely piece of a system that will poke and prod at him until he stays in his place. This sort of blind submission is something I think is all too drilled into our malleable minds as young as our high school years. You are taught to obey. By obeying, you are told, success, elusively defined, will come. And if you are a good student, a perfectionist like myself, you take it literally. And by doing so, by being politically correct, you are succumbing to the desires of others and ignoring the little voice in side of your head that instructs you to set your own plans for your future into action and prioritize that above all else. The little Jiminy Cricket voice that whispers to you that missing your homework isn’t the end of the world, that getting an A- or an A+ doesn’t really matter that much in the bigger picture, that if you don’t become a doctor as your parents encourage, life still goes on. None of these circumstances will condemn you to Hell on earth. But what will condemn you to Hell is when you passively submit to the system, do as you’re told, and fail to pave your own individual pathway to your success.